Isilon Adds Auto Tiering, Analytics To Its OneFS Storage OS

Isilon this month plans to roll out new data management applications to combine multiple tiers of storage into a single file system and provide increased analytics as part of the rollout of its next-generation OneFS scale-out storage operating system.

The new applications, including SmartPools for creating a single file system and a single point of management for multiple storage tiers and InsightIQ to provide data to help identify and remedy performance issues, make it easier for solution providers and their customers to build scale-out storage architectures, said Phil Crocker, director of channel marketing for the Seattle-based company.

Isilon's OneFS operating system software combines three layers of traditional storage architectures, including file system, volume manager, and RAID, into a single software layer for an intelligent file system that spans all nodes within a cluster.

OneFS allows storage capacity to scale both in terms of performance and capacity to over 45 GBs per second of throughput and over 10.4 petabytes of capacity in a single file system, all with a single point of management.

Interest in scaling storage performance and capacity is growing as customers move their storage into virtualized environments and then into cloud environments, leading to new opportunities for Isilon's channel partners, Crocker said.

"With scale-out storage, our customers are relying more on the channel to tie their storage to a complete solution instead of a point solution," he said.

With SmartPools, customers gain the ability to manage multiple tiers of storage with a single point of management and as a single volume, said Nick Kirsch, director of product marketing at Isilon.

SmartPools automatically migrates hot data to the customer's highest-performance storage tier, and then to lower-cost storage as the data becomes less and less accessed, Kirsch said. However, should the data become more "warm," it will be migrated to faster storage.

Solution providers working with SmartPools have access to such services opportunities as analyzing a customer's storage environment to help it get familiar with its storage workflow, as well as add automation to get that workflow more efficient over time, he said.

SmartPools is priced between $3,950 and $9,950 per 2U or 4U node, with actual price determined by the total capacity managed by the node.

InsightIQ is a software add-on to OneFS that analyzes storage performance and file system usage, and presents a storage-centric view of that information to the customer, Kirsch said.

"But it's not just storage metrics," he said. "InsightIQ also looks at files, memory, and the impact on storage to customers. Customers can then use the information to understand how their applications impact their storage."

InsightIQ is priced between $1,950 and $3,850 per storage node.

Both StoragePools and InsightIQ are slated to be generally available by the end of July.

About 62 percent of Isilon's revenue comes from indirect sales channels, but the company expects this figure to grow to 70 percent by year-end, said Sam Grocott, Isilon's vice president of marketing.